Page Fuels Led Zeppelin Fan Hopes: New Album, Tour?

Here’s some interesting post from the Gibson website…

As the days count down to Led Zeppelin’s reunion at the December 10 Ahmet Ertegun Tribute concert in London, new details surrounding the event continue to emerge, along with evidence of how truly fevered fan interest in the show has become.

Some tantalizing reports even suggest the reunion will be ongoing, not merely a one-off like previous Zep appearances at Live Aid and the subsequent Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary tribute of 1988.

The BBC reports that the band held secret rehearsals prior to announcing the reunion gig. “We wanted to see how well we’d be playing together, and once we played, it was without doubt we wanted to do it,” Jimmy Page said. “The hardest thing of having anything to do with Led Zeppelin is getting together and rehearsing without anybody finding out about it.” In another interview, Page confirmed his reunited band had jammed together as early as June.

A Glasgow BBC 2 listener paid £83,000 ($170,000) for a pair of tickets to see the reunited Zep perform. The tickets were auctioned to raise funds for the BBC’s Children in Need charity, which benefits disadvantaged youth in the U.K. Face value of the tickets was £250 ($510).

Just as dairy farmer-turned-Glastonbury Festival promoter Michael Eavis received a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire honor from Queen Elizabeth II for helming the successful and long-running music event—700+ acts have played Glastonbury over the last 37 years—reports surfaced that Eavis had been in secret talks with Led Zeppelin to headline the 2008 concerts.

Canada’s Winnipeg Sun newspaper also quotes Jimmy Page as saying he’d be “really surprised” if the current reunion didn’t lead to new studio recordings by the band, but he was more coy about a potential tour. “We’re musicians—as we’re playing we’ll probably be coming up with all manner of things,” Page told the paper. “That will be fun. Let’s do the [upcoming] show, shall we? And then we’ll speak to you afterwards.”

Further revving fan’s hopes is an interview Reuters recently conducted with Page, wherein he announced that Led Zeppelin will debut a song they’ve never before played live. “There’s one number that we rehearsed, I assume that it will make it to the Dome, that we never played at any point in time,” Page said. “It dates from when the band was together between 1968 and 1980. It’s a really intense number.”

For guitarists, here’s an interesting question: will Jimmy Page use a setup similar to the one he’s used in the 70’s heydays, or will he use the custom-made pedalboard made for him in the 90s, by Pete Cornish? Here’s the info about his later-day gear:

“After extensive testing and comparisons of various effects pedals and amplifiers by Jimmy and his technician we were asked to build an effects system that would operate with equal efficiency in every country in the world and incorporate all Jimmy’s chosen effects and route the signal to several amplifiers.

Most of the effects had so called “true bypass” footswitches and we decided to investigate whether we could use this system with the entire collection of effects and amps as so many manufacturers offer the “true bypass” as the ultimate type of switching.

Our findings were that the “true bypass” did NOT create unified signal level or tone from the guitar for the following reason:

Take for instance a 5m guitar cable linked to six pedals, each linked by a 1m cable, and then on to the amp by say a 15m cable. If all pedals have “true bypass”, and are off, then the total cable length hanging on the guitar output will be 25m. This will cause a huge loss of tone and signal level particularly if the guitar is a vintage type with low output. The amp volume is then turned up and the treble control increased to compensate for the losses.

The inherent background noise now increases by the amount of the gain and treble increase and is usually, in my experience, too bad for serious work. If one of the pedals is now switched on, then it’s high input impedance (and usually low output impedance) will buffer the output cables from the guitar; the signal level and treble content will rise due to the removal of some of the load on the pickups (i.e. 6m instead of 25m of cable). If that pedal was for example a chorus or delay, devices which are usually unity gain, then the overall signal level and tone will vary each time an effect is added…not a very good idea.

The “Pete Cornish System”, which we devised in the early 70’s, is to feed the guitar into a fixed high impedance load, which is identical to the amp input, and then distribute the signal to the various effects and amps by low impedance buffered feeds. This gives a constant signal level and tonal characteristics from the guitar, which do not change at all when effects are added. The proof that this works are in the recordings of our clients: Roxy Music; The Police; Queen; Pink Floyd; Bryan Adams; Lou Reed; Dire Straits; Paul McCartney; Sting; Judas Priest; Black Sabbath….

For Jimmy’s stage system, we fitted additional high impedance pre-amps between each effect to further isolate each one from the next in line. We also provided two send/return circuits so that new effects could be added at a later date and another send/return to Jimmy’s Echoplex. The four isolated outputs to the stage amplifiers each had a line driver fitted to overcome the very long across-stage cables (total length 64m).

To ensure that the sound of the guitar and effects would remain constant at each venue across the world we designed “super regulated” dc power supplies to suit both the effects and the audio frequency pre-amps. Each effect and pre-amp had it’s own isolated dc feed which we know helps to prevent cross-leakage of effect signals: for example upper harmonic distortion products can leak into clean chorus circuits through a common power supply if this precaution is not taken.

Jimmy was very pleased with his “Pete Cornish Guitar/Effects/Amps System” and it has proved most reliable and convenient to set up, as all the effects and routing are permanently in the correct
order and it is so simple to “just plug in and play…”

GUITAR SYSTEM S/No: 257
DESIGNED AND BUILT BY PETE AND LYNDA CORNISH
OCTOBER 1993